22.08.2024
After the riots
Racist violence erupted in almost every part of Britain. We need a better response than liberal hand-wringing and blinkered economism, argues Paul Demarty
For a week or so beginning on July 30, as readers will be aware, cities in Britain and Northern Ireland became the scene of racist rioting.
The formal inciting incident was the stabbing of several children and teachers at a dance class in Southport on Merseyside by a teenager, Axel Rudakubana. His identity was not released, being under the age of 18, and his motive remains unclear; on the evidence of many such outrages over the Atlantic, the conventional quest for a motive may be onto a loser anyway. The way was open for opportunists to fill this void with their own story: that this was the act of a Muslim asylum-seeker, who had come over on one of the hated small boats. Far-right demagogues put together protests, which rapidly spiralled into orgiastic pogroms.
The resulting scenes were not pretty. Organised assaults were directed at hotels housing asylum-seekers. Racist crews assaulted people thought to be vaguely Muslim-looking, and before long anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time who was not white. Several buildings were torched, including a citizen’s advice bureau in Sunderland. Looting inevitably followed: much mockery was directed at the sight of a rioter ‘liberating’ a tray of sausage rolls from Greggs, and even some luxury bath bombs from Lush were purloined in the name of “taking our country back”. As the arrests piled up, and the energy started to leak out of the mobs, they began to be outnumbered by both police and anti-racist counter-protestors, and things fizzled out, as they always do.
So, for a couple of weeks, we have been conducting the traditional national post-mortem. Part of that, of course, has involved mass arrests and the most rapid prosecution of the rioters. The other, more substantial part has been the interpretation of events, which - in the bourgeois sphere - has come in several different layers, each dependent on slightly silly special pleading, and each subject to contestation.
Interpretations
The most basic interpretation possible is that of ‘law and order’ - the people involved were simply thugs and criminals, and a proper response amounts to ‘rounding up the usual suspects’. By August 5, even the Daily Mail, whose output has been an endless tissue of semi-fictional immigrant crime stories for as long as anyone can remember, hailed counterprotests as a triumph of decency over thuggery.
Of course, there is some truth to that. Whatever else these events were, they were carnivals of criminal violence. For some of those arrested, it was far from their first rodeo. Some wider attention was paid to the trial of two men arrested for disorder in Plymouth. One had complained in his police interview of the use of “taxpayers’ money” to “keep these people [presumably immigrants] in the country after committing such heinous crimes”. The judge, in summing up, pointed out that this gentleman had racked up no less than 170 criminal convictions in his life, at no small cost to the exchequer, and might want to bear that in mind next time he riots in defence of British taxpayers. I have been told by mental health professionals down this way that, of the five men arrested in this riot (one counterprotestor was also nicked), four are “clients”, as they now call them, of the NHS mental health apparatus. These are not well-adjusted people.
How representative such men are of the overall mass is hard to discern. Many more participated than were arrested; they contributed to the overall atmosphere of terror and intimidation without looting, assaulting people or fighting the cops. Though the various fascist sects - Britain First, Atomwaffen and friends - participated, so did many other people of no known formal political affiliation. The willingness of more ‘respectable’ figures on the right, like Robert Jenrick or Matthew Goodwin, to insist that people’s “legitimate grievances” should not be swept away by revulsion at the violent excesses of the rioters is notable. Exactly how the tissue of straightforward falsehoods that immediately occasioned the disorder could possibly constitute a “legitimate grievance” is not clear.
Palestine
There is also the complaint that these outrages on the right are treated more severely than leftwing protests - presumably having in mind the recent mass demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine, which the rightwing hive-mind has convinced itself amount to “hate marches”. If they are unable to accept that the Palestine demos are almost entirely peaceful, however, it seems at least that the cops are aware that it is a safer deployment than anything put together by Tommy Robinson. The police casualty list of the recent riots: 130-plus officers injured, plus seven dogs, and one horse. The police casualty list of nearly a year of Palestine marches: zero. A more obvious comparator would be the 2011 riots after the police shooting of Mark Duggan, which caused a similar level of harm to the boys, girls and horses in blue, and resulted in three times as many arrests. The Director of Public Prosecutions at the time? “Two-tier Keir” Starmer.
Beyond the basic ‘thug rampage’ interpretation of these events, there is the “disinformation” explanation. This at least has the virtue of accepting that some account is necessary of the motives of the rioters that is not merely apologetic, and of taking seriously the regrettable circumstance that so much lively terror was spread in enraged response to straightforward fiction. It has the vice of merely falling back on the stalest clichés of the Anglo-American political establishment - that this is all the work of outside agitators, whether in the form of demagogues outside the pale of official British politics, like Robinson - who enjoyed the spectacle from the safety of Cyprus, in hiding from charges of contempt of court - or Andrew Tate, or the subversive activities of adversary states.
We are subjected to no end of risible accusations that this was all a matter of those dastardly “Russian botnets”, that it was all Kremlin ‘active measures’ (like Trump, like Brexit, like every other inconvenience to afflict the political class). No real evidence has been offered for this, any more than all the other just-so stories about Vladimir Putin puppet-mastering global reaction. If anything of the sort can be claimed accurately, paranoid liberals - and miserable pseudo-left outriders like Paul Mason - ought to look in the other direction. Most of the amplification of the preposterous stories circulating after the Southport stabbings took place in that indispensable nation that is the United States, most notoriously in the person of Elon Musk, the boss of the website formerly known as Twitter, whose remaining anchors to reality are coming loose one after the other.
British far-right agitators are in far more regular communication with their US allies, with whom they share a common language and a large fund of common grievances. The hated “woke mind virus” spread out from America, and so does the polymorphously perverse resistance to it. Official political society in this country can no more understand these political pathologies as all-American than it can see them as truly British. Aren’t we supposed to be the freedom-loving ones? Are we the bad guys?
As a result, the clearest political lead from the government on where to go next is merely … more speech controls, more censorship of social media, a stronger Online Safety Act. Musk has raised a hypocritical hue and cry over this, although the fact the he himself participated in the hysteria that led to mass violence has rather blunted his cutting edge on this point. It would nonetheless be another notch on the ratchet of online speech-policing, and the Russian angle is helpful here: what is fundamentally going on with state interference in internet media is inter-state competition. A wave of pogromist violence is a crisis that simply cannot be let go to waste.
Left response
How then is all this chaos to be understood? The left has responded in a number of ways. It is no surprise that the counterprotests are largely organised under the umbrella of the Socialist Workers Party’s Stand Up To Racism front, which is ever ready to spring into action. Given our long-standing criticisms of the SWP/SUTR brand of anti-racism, we should say that these clearly played a useful role in shifting the momentum.
Large, well-organised counter-protests - apart from anything else - occupied space that could not be easily ravaged by racist rioters, in this respect functioning (though they would not want it put this way) as police auxiliaries. Indeed, they were even thanked by Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley. The worst chaos, certainly, was inflicted before the counterprotests were fully organised.
These activists were brave to step into a situation that clearly carried real physical threat, in some cases physically defending hotels and mosques under attack by frenzied goons, and can be assured that they made an important difference.
For the SWP, this is proof of the correctness of their strategy and analysis. As Charlie Kimber put it on August 7,
If you have official politics saturated with racism, scapegoating and officially-sanctioned Islamophobia, then this will feed the far right and incubate a fascist core. Violent racists will say that politicians claim to be concerned about the scale of migration and the behaviour of Islamists. But they do nothing effective about it. So the far right must solve these matters through their own actions. It’s no pleasure to say we were right, and in many ways we now face the most threatening fascist challenge for a century.1
He goes on to place some of the blame on neoliberalism, dated in his account from the mid-1970s, which has seen the main parties fail to offer “significant improvements in working class people’s lives”, in favour of “austerity and cuts”. Anti-migrant sentiment, Islamophobia and racism are offered as a deflection from “the fury about gross inequality and fantastic elite privilege”.
A similar tack is taken by Claudia Webbe, the former Labour MP, in the Morning Star: she argues, on the basis of impressionistic usage of Umberto Eco, of all people, that the British state is already semi-fascist (meeting nine of Eco’s 14 criteria), and concludes that we must
… get across the message that what matters is our class solidarity and that this, regardless of skin colour or faith, is what can affect the change that millions need to see in our country … If we unite around this message and refuse to be diverted from it, we can win the arguments on race, on the structure of our society, on austerity, on justice - and against fascism. More people than ever are waking up to them. Fascism is an existential threat to decency and justice - but a united left movement of ‘the many’ can and will defeat it.2
The austerity angle is the main one pursued by the Socialist Party in England and Wales, whose paper carried the front-page headline, “Jobs, homes and services for all! Smash racism!” The short accompanying article, by SPEW national committee member Nick Chaffey, is very much on this theme: “The Socialist Party calls for a united working class fight for jobs, homes and public services for all, against racist division. We live in the world’s sixth richest country. The money is there; we need to fight for it.”3
Such economism is given short shrift by Richard Seymour, writing on the New Left Review’s frequently interesting Sidecar blog:
The left often has its own comforting narrative in which plebeian racist violence is a distorted expression of ‘material interests’. This usually translates as a call to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ rather than ‘identity politics’: as though we could route around the perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity by offering jobs and wages. No doubt we need more bread and butter, but that is strictly orthogonal to what is taking place. Racism sometimes works as a form of displaced or distorted class politics, but not always …
Those drawn to this ethnonationalist politics steadfastly refuse to be particularly poor or marginalised. They may have experienced relative class decline or inhabit declining regions, but they are as likely to be middle class as workers. Racism does not so much express misplaced class grievance as organise the toxic emotions of failure, humiliation and decline.4
Finally, we can cite a reply to Seymour in the same venue, by historian and political theorist Anton Jäger, who is wary of throwing out the economic baby with the economistic bathwater:
Granted, the riots are no twisted expression of ‘material interests’. But this should not lead us into a form of superstructuralism that represses the economic roots of the current crisis. The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks … To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy.5
Jäger notes the importance of inward migration to the British economy (already the background to Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” rhetoric half a century ago, and certainly true today), with large numbers of legal migrants necessary to keep essential services running. The result is “an economy dependent on cheap labour for its meagre growth rates, unable to deliver meaningful productivity, with a population that increasingly wants the state to mount some kind of systemic intervention.” He agrees with Seymour that “there is no repressed emancipatory core to the riots, no ‘energy’ which can be recuperated … But beneath British pogromism still lies a universe of misery which it is the left’s historic task to negate.”
Cable Street
Jäger in this respect ends up closer to Kimber and the SWP than either Seymour or SPEW, though he is more cautious on the usefulness of “A-to-B marches”. Oddly perhaps for a historian, his history of the problem begins, at the earliest, with Powell, and really with Cameron. Much the same could be said for Kimber’s placing of the riots in the context of neoliberalism. True enough, but these are hardly the first such events. Many have called back to the battle of Cable Street, as well they might; but one could mention riots targeted at Irish immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries (also carriers of what was then considered a hostile and alien religion … ), or even Tory pogroms against Huguenot refugees in the century before that.
The more immediate determinations matter, of course, but Marxists do not stop there. There is clearly something in the whole package of capitalist society that gives rise to these outrages.
First of all, the strength of the working class is directly - or even exponentially - proportional to its unity. A strike cannot succeed if too many people scab. Cooperatives can only succeed with large-scale buy-in from the workers at large. There is thus a bourgeois interest in cultivating divisions among the workers, on racial or ethnic or religious lines, or between gay and straight people, and so on. Propaganda in this direction is inevitably addressed to the whole society, however, and so subaltern sections of the dominant classes and the petty bourgeoisie also suffer, and dominant sections thrive.
This leads us to, secondly, the persistence of the petty bourgeoisie - in spite of fundamental economic trends towards its elimination - in which respect it forms a distinct political resource within the plebs. The bourgeoisie proper, after all, is small. It needs leverage among the popular classes, and the interest of the petty bourgeoisie in its property makes it winnable (though its precarity also makes it a potential target for hegemony under working class leadership). (The rumour that the Southport murderer was a small-boat person has been traced to a certain Bernadette Spofforth, a small business owner; analogous class positions can be assigned to those demagogues Seymour delightfully terms the “lumpencommentariat”.)
Thirdly, capitalism demands a military-bureaucratic state, and indeed inevitably produces competition between states. Seymour distinguishes the motives of the current disorder, of protecting the nation-state from outside interlopers, from an earlier imperial racism directed at the preservation of Britain’s global dominance. Yet both are ways of improving or protecting Britain’s position in the world relative to other states. They respond to the same fundamental dynamics of the capitalist world order, at different stages of British ascent and decline.
The interest of the working class in collective strength drives it to organise - both in immediate defence of its conditions of life, in trade unions or cooperatives, and ultimately in political organisation, for at the very least a seat at the top table, and, in the organisations of the revolutionary workers’ movement, for democratic rule of society as a whole. The pursuit of these aims through collective strength produces social institutions that include broad masses in activity, and from there a distinctive culture and ideological landscape.
Mass-membership political parties representing other classes and class alliances largely emerge in response to this political challenge, transforming existing mechanisms of political rule: for instance, the ‘club’-based structure of the old Tory and Whig parties in this country, but also in continental Europe new mass movements of Catholic laity, from French proto-fascist groups like Action Française (and the more respectable Catholic Action movement of the 1930s) to the Centre Party of Weimar Germany. There is another response - the bureaucratisation of the workers’ movement, which tends to subordinate it to the bourgeoisie. The middle class is crucial on both sides, providing the foot soldiers for bourgeois mass organisations and the administrative elite of the bureaucratised workers’ organisations.
Subordination to the bourgeoisie means subordination to the state, and therefore complicity in inter-state competition. Support for imperialism is support for favourable conditions, for small businesses in the metropole and for workers’ organisations involved in corporatist administration. But imperialism itself has a time limit: industrial capacity in the metropole atrophies, thanks to the dynamics of global finance, new competitors arise and oppressed peoples gather the confidence to throw off the shackles. The end result is the sort of low-wage, low-productivity economy described by Jäger, frequently dependent for that reason on large inward migration. Pro-imperialism of this sort usually eats itself; but, if not seriously opposed by the revolutionary left, it is liable to be replaced by a more thoroughgoing anti-migrant chauvinism.
Which brings us to Kimber’s mid-1970s, and the all-out assault on the workers’ movement that in this country gets the name, ‘Thatcherism’. The centripetal force of mass organisation is broken, and the result at the level of ideology is atomisation, nihilism and despair. At this point, the way is decisively open for the free manipulation of workers, lumpenised ex-workers and petty bourgeois by the “lumpencommentariat”.
Wrong, wrong …
Given this background, it is clear that the political conclusions drawn by our exemplary leftwing voices are wrong.
The SWP approach of building a broad anti-racist movement on totally minimal politics merely adopts the politics of the liberal bourgeoisie, but this means silencing the essence of revolutionary socialist politics: our open disloyalty to the state. The SWP opposes a stronger Online Safety Act in its paper, but in its practice it all but demands one, because its practice involves giving platforms to people who openly support stronger speech controls under condition that the SWP is forbidden from denouncing them. It thus tends to propel the cycle that generates far-right ideology. The same problem is evident in Webbe’s contribution, where she cannot in the end decide if she wants a movement of “class solidarity” or “of the many, not the few”.
It is not clear what Seymour thinks should actually be done, but his insistence on analysing this phenomenon purely in terms of American-style critical race theory - “wages of whiteness” and all - implies precisely the identitarianism of that movement, and therefore merely the promotion of different forms of sectionalism. It is, therefore, equally powerless in the face of the overall political-ideological dynamics.
This leaves SPEW and Jäger. Like Seymour, Jäger is cagy about explicit political proposals, but his identification of austerity as the primary cause of vulnerability to pogromist ideology invites counterfactuals to the years of austerity, of what could otherwise have been done in these lost years. With SPEW, it is quite explicit - the answer is a programme of bread-and-butter, social democratic reforms, coupled with strengthening the trade unions. Once we put things in terms of the irreducible dynamics of capitalism, however, it is plain that the bread-and-butter approach fails. What is possible is a function of global political and economic dynamics, and without a meaningful political force openly committed to the overthrow of the system, all momentary advances will merely terminate in defeat and disillusionment.
It is not that the existence of such an alternative will immediately convert rioters to the cause of international socialism. We are dealing, clearly, with acute political backwardness, and have enough work to do reorienting the labour movement before we have any chance with the GB News addicts. Nor does this long-term perspective absolve us of our defensive tasks in the present, as the success of counterprotests and physical defence of threatened people shows. It is rather that we need some way out of this death-loop, where the natural political cycle produces a periodic danger of chauvinist violence, and meanwhile drags politics as a whole to the right over time (as Labour tries to meet these famous “legitimate concerns” … )
There is, bluntly, no way out that does not involve the wholesale rejection of the whole show - not just austerity, but the intrinsic corruption of capitalist politics: the stealth-disenfranchisement of the population by way of suborning or smashing their political organisations; the lamentable role of Britain in global economic and military affairs; total control of the media by billionaires and state organisations; the anti-democratic nature of the standing police force. This is not the job for a coalition of “the many”, or a single-issue anti-racist campaign, or even (as SPEW seem to think) the trade union leadership, but a Communist Party.